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But magic spells; how can their efficacy be explained?
By the reigning sympathy and by the fact in Nature that there is
an agreement of like forces and an opposition of unlike, and by
the diversity of those multitudinous powers which converge in the
one living universe.
There is much drawing and spell-binding dependent on no
interfering machination; the true magic is internal to the All,
its attractions and, not less, its repulsions. Here is the primal
mage and sorcerer- discovered by men who thenceforth turn those
same ensorcellations and magic arts upon one another.
Love is given in Nature; the qualities inducing love induce
mutual approach: hence there has arisen an art of magic
love-drawing whose practitioners, by the force of contact implant
in others a new temperament, one favouring union as being
informed with love; they knit soul to soul as they might train
two separate trees towards each other. The magician too draws on
these patterns of power, and by ranging himself also into the
pattern is able tranquilly to possess himself of these forces
with whose nature and purpose he has become identified. Supposing
the mage to stand outside the All, his evocations and invocations
would no longer avail to draw up or to call down; but as things
are he operates from no outside standground, he pulls knowing the
pull of everything towards any other thing in the living system.
The tune of an incantation, a significant cry, the mien of the
operator, these too have a natural leading power over the soul
upon which they are directed, drawing it with the force of
mournful patterns or tragic sounds- for it is the reasonless
soul, not the will or wisdom, that is beguiled by music, a form
of sorcery which raises no question, whose enchantment, indeed,
is welcomed, exacted, from the performers. Similarly with regard
to prayers; there is no question of a will that grants; the
powers that answer to incantations do not act by will; a human
being fascinated by a snake has neither perception nor sensation
of what is happening; he knows only after he has been caught, and
his highest mind is never caught. In other words, some influence
falls from the being addressed upon the petitioner- or upon
someone else- but that being itself, sun or star, perceives
nothing of it all.
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